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Hello, America.
Welcome back to the Sean Hannity Show.
This is Jeffrey Lord sitting in for our friend Sean Hannity.
And we have a special guest on with us now.
We will be talking to journalist Michael Schellenberger.
And you may have seen him in the news because as you know, he's one of the independent journalists who's been tapped by Elon Musk and I think in this case Barry Weiss to sift through round seven of the Twitter files.
And what Michael has uncovered is just stunning.
It's no joke.
It's twelve.
I find it really chilling.
And as a result of what he's discovered, Michael is calling for Congress to probe revelations, the FBI and the intelligence committee uh community work to discredit, quote unquote.
The Hunter Biden laptop story that appeared in the New York Post ahead of the 2020 uh presidential election.
So without further ado, hello, Michael, how are you?
Good hey, thanks for having me.
You bet, you bet.
So tell us a little bit about this.
Uh what you what you've discovered.
I mean, I think this is such a bizarre set of stories here, but it doesn't I have to say it doesn't surprise me in the least that stuff was going on.
What what have you seen here was as you've been uh going through this?
Well, if you you know, uh what it appears to be, and I can't entirely prove, and that's partly why we need an investigation, but it appears to have been an organized influence campaign by the FBI and retired FBI officials,
including the former chief counsel, potentially the former deputy chief of staff, um, at Twitter, trying to basically prime both news organizations and social media platforms, namely Twitter and Facebook, to view the Hunter Biden laptop as a product of Russian disinformation rather than for what it really was, which was something turned over by a whistleblower to the FBI in December 2019.
He was a computer repair store owner.
Um FBI had that laptop since December 2019.
And yet through all of 2020, the FBI and uh former FBI officials, both inside and outside of Twitter and we think also Facebook, were communicating that they should be on guard for a hack and leak operation, meaning where the Russians would supposedly hack into somebody's computer and then leak it, but it would be misinformation.
And we now know that um that really influenced how Twitter and everybody else, the news media, um, and then ultimately the public perceived the Hunter Biden laptop so that a lot of people, including myself, dismissed the laptop as real and were very suspicious of it when we should have taken its content more seriously.
What are your thoughts?
I mean, we had those, what was it, fifty people from the intelligence community come out and say this was Russian disinformation.
How much of this do you think was genuinely they didn't understand, and how much of it do you think was just deliberately designed to save Joe Biden?
I I I think I have to say, after looking at all this, I would say like a hundred percent is from wanting to protect Biden and they wanted to get rid of Trump.
I mean, these are characters who have been on the record as wanting to get rid of Trump for years.
Right.
I also I didn't even mention that episode, by the way, in my I wrote Twitter Files part seven, and I didn't even get to that, which is but when you look at all of these things together, there's clearly an influence campaign.
Now, somebody could say, well, it wasn't organized, it was more you know, tacit, but it was uh incredibly effective, incredibly there was people working on the inside of Twitter, people outside of Twitter.
There were the national security, the retired national security executives who signed that letter.
And there was also very strange an Aspen Institute workshop where they took the senior news executives and national security correspondents for the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and Twitter and Facebook.
And they got them together for what they call a tabletop exercise, which is basically to do a scenario for how to, I mean, if I'm being honest, how to not cover or miscover the Hunter Biden laptop.
And they did that in September.
one month before the laptop came to the public view.
Wow wow that is incredible.
Well one of the concerns and you know I wrote this book called Swamp Wars uh Donald Trump and the New American Populism versus the old order and one of the things and I worked in Washington for a long time for Congressman Senator President that would be President Reagan and then Jack Kemp is HUD when he was secretary in the Bush administration.
You really do come away with the impression after all of that that there is a swamp here.
That it's uh as I've said earlier in the show not unlike junior high school you got the cool kids and you got the not so cool kids and the cool kids run the show.
And you when you when you get to something like this, this is just to me incredibly dangerous if you've got this combination of big tech and big media um withholding information in essence from the Americ not in essence in reality from the American people that that is a real problem and and that speaks exactly to why what you were doing and and Barry Weiss and uh Matt Taibee uh are are important
here because there have to be people who are willing to really investigate and wow we're talking about a shortage of that it's alarming the extent to which you can see people basically taking efforts to prevent the public from considering what the Biden family business has been.
I mean, it's important for people to understand that there's literally tens of millions of dollars that's gone to Joe Biden's son, to Joe Biden's brother, from powerful foreign interests, including four Chinese individuals who are tied to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence.
So this is not a minor issue.
This is not this is around countries that are direct geopolitical rivals paying money into the Biden family.
And maybe you think that that that'll be OK or you're not worried about that.
But then why would there have been this huge cover up of it that went on for so long and then a real misinformation campaign related to it?
It doesn't make any sense.
You know, I think that.
I think it raises really disturbing questions around both the role of the FBI and the FBI needs to be cleaned out.
There needs to be a deep politicization of the FBI.
It's our most important law enforcement body.
I also think it's an indictment of the news media they are they these reporters that are basically doing the they're they're acting as public relations staff for the national security state rather than playing the typical role of journalists which is to be skeptical of power and and inquiring of power and critical of it.
Yeah I think that's uh I think you got it absolutely right here and this this is a problem and I'm frankly we were just talking with uh Congressman uh James Comer from Kentucky who's going to be the incoming chair of the uh House Oversight Committee and I think that this is this kind of thing is going to get some examination from him and from his committee as as well it should.
I mean, I think this kind of mentality has dominated the January 6th committee.
The selection of the members, you know, they're all there, Republican or Democrat, because they can't stand Donald Trump.
You know, and there's no defense allowed, no cross-examination, none of this.
I mean, when you think of the really fundamental American values that are being, you know, trashed, basically, and not followed.
um in a physical sense How much of this Twitter stuff have you had to go through?
I mean I can I I have this image in my head of you and everybody else involved in this sitting up into the wee hours, you know, and looking at, you know, Twitter, Twitter number one thousand seven hundred and five, et cetera.
How how much of this was there and how long did it take you to go through?
Yeah, I mean it is it's enormous amount of information and yeah, I definitely have been um until I published my piece, I just wasn't doing any I wasn't returning any phone calls on any of the other things I work on because you know, part of it is that there's there's hundred there's thousands of documents that we've had to read through.
Right and um it's like anything, you know, most of it is just the ordinary business work, and so you're looking for the really critical moments and and then of course I think it's well publicized that Twitter is struggling financially, that Elon overpaid for it um, or at least overpaid for it according to its market value.
I think Twitter has a social public value that's much higher than its financial value, but nonetheless, the the people giving us the documents, everyone's being pulled off from doing stuff to save the company to give us these documents.
So we're very grateful to them for whatever you think of you know, Elon Musk, you know, this is uh he's he's done a real public service in making these documents available.
So uh we feel very uh blessed to have had it, and honestly, I think that in my Twitter thread, I think there's plenty of information in that single Twitter files part seven to justify a serious congressional investigation and maybe a special prosecutor because the documents that we've revealed um show show the pattern quite quite clearly.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Well, as I as I said to uh another of our guests uh in in knowing that I was gonna be having conversation over the course of the show today about the FBI.
I went back and looked at a book about the FBI written by uh a guy named Ronald Kessler who did an in-depth study of it.
And there you find uh w what was sort of amusing to me since it's this was uh long ago, uh J. Edgar Hoover basically telling President Kennedy he's got he's got an informant who says that he was he President Kennedy was married before Jackie.
Then then he tells Robert Kennedy, who's not only the president's brother but attorney general and therefore Hoover's boss that he has information from the agent that he was ha that he, Bobby Kennedy was having an affair with a woman in El Paso.
And Robert Kennedy replied isily, he'd never been to El Paso.
And then he did the same thing with Richard Nixon.
Uh we have information, sir, that you're uh that you've been having an affair with a woman in China.
So I you know, as much as I admire the FBI uh and and and knew uh at least one agent who lived in my area of Pennsylvania and was a straight arrow.
I I I mean, there's a history here of the FBI not being uh as good as it should be when it comes to these things.
And I just think this has gotten out of control that this this whole business of uh you know hating Donald Trump has really pulled the curtain back because I think it's about more than Donald Trump.
I think if you've got people in these positions thinking that they can do whatever they want uh and not get caught and manipulate uh the American media or big tech and and not to mention if you've got people in big tech that are all too willing to be manipulated.
This is this is a problem.
Yes.
Well, Michael, I mean we Go ahead.
Go ahead.
Well, no, I mean these are you know, I think the thing that gives me some hope.
You may uh that you know, people it went uh viral on Twitter the other day, the testimony of Frank Church in believe 1974, 1975, he was a member of Congress or maybe a senator who was involved in kind of cleaning up the intelligence agencies which had been uh had had really had been there'd been abuse of power.
I mean those words kept ringing through my head as I've been working on this over the last couple of work weeks of abuse of power and and I think that that you know these institutions they periodically are corrupted.
I mean, I think our founding fathers were aware that this would happen.
So you have a uh basically a good system, but we need we need to clean up these agencies and root out the politicization of them.
Um and get some new oversight, some new mechanisms, but basically it's time.
I just think after a while these institutions go bad.
And on the media, that's on the on the FBI side.
On the media side, you know, with the internet is changing everything.
Uh the social media environment has opened up new voices for that.
You know, Elon Musk um is working, you know, people that he knows are independent or not at the traditional corporate media.
We're independent, but now the media has to kind of follow what we're writing on this.
I think people don't trust the corporate news media, the mainstream news media very much anymore.
And uh so I think that some of these reforms are gonna occur thanks to technology as well.
Yeah, I think you're exactly right.
We live in a new world here, and uh we've all got to figure out how to adjust.
Michael, thank you.
We're running out of time here, so thank you very much for taking the time to uh talk to us, and uh this story is not going away, so keep at it.
Thanks so much for having me.
You bet.
Bye bye.
All right.
Thank you, Michael.
That was Michael Shellenberger, who just dropped the Twitter files number seven, which certainly deserves a much closer look and an investigation into the Biden family, China, and big tech.
My name is Jeffrey Lord sitting in for Sean Hannity today.
Please follow me at Real Jeffrey Lord and listen to my podcast wherever podcasts are found.
You can follow me at Truth Social and the Word of the Lord and my website, the Jeffrey Lord.com.
Hey there, I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
And I'm Carol Markowitz.
We've been in political media for a long time.
Long enough to know that it's gotten, well, a little insane.
That's why we started normally a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity.
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You're our kind of people.
Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.
Hey there, I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
And I'm Carol Markowitz.
We've been in political media for a long time.
Long enough to know that it's gotten, well, a little insane.
That's why we started normally a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity.
We talk about the issues that actually matter to the country without panic, without yelling, and with a healthy dose of humor.
We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the truth seriously.
So if you're into common sense, sanity, and some occasional sass.
You're our kind of people.
Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.
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Oh wow, we we rounded it out nice and easy in there, huh?
We just put it all in from the world.
So Linda and I will return shortly, and we're gonna have an interesting discussion about uh President Biden and how he sort of does things and doesn't do them so well and whether they're sort of smart or not and whether he has a history.
And he does have a history, and in one case of this, I personally can testify uh to it because it rhymes with agem.
That's all right.
That's right.
So we will be back uh very, very shortly here and close out the night.
This is Jeffrey Lord for Sean Hannity.
And that number is eight hundred nine four one seven three two six or eight hundred nine four one Sean, if you want to do it that way.
This is Jeffrey Lord, and welcome back to the last half hour of the Sean Hannity show.
We are uh a handful of days from Christmas.
You know, Linda, the one person, and I know you tried so hard to get him on the show, but it was Santa Claus.
And he I I mean he he just more or less blew us off and said he had this thing he had to do.
He was like, ho ho ho, and uh see you later.
Ru Rudolph w was acting up and uh I guess there were some problems there.
So I think it was probably a good thing that we didn't, you know, have him on and just hard to find good help.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, With all those little elves and all this kind of thing.
I mean, it's just it's just difficult.
So they unionized.
Man, it got weird.
Yes, it did.
It did.
Quickly.
And and then you find out that it's not uh Will, what's his name?
Will Farrell, you know, that uh Listen, there are real elves out there.
I love Elf.
I love Jimmy Conga Rest of Soul, and I love Will Farrell.
That movie is amazing.
I found out yesterday it is twenty years old, and my heart hurt a little.
Oh wow.
Is that right, Ethan?
Twenty years old.
So you saw it when you were five.
Clearly.
It's actually four and a half, but who's counting.
Oh goodness.
All right.
Well, we're gonna have a little discussion here about our uh our president and some of the problems he's been uh having.
And and you know, just this minute a story has popped up on Fox News and the headline is Biden fumed, dropped F bombs as border crisis intensified new book claims.
And you just think, how did he get into this situation in the first place?
And uh it's been my observation, and I'm certain certainly not alone, that uh uh sadly he's th is not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to solutions and various situations, and that has gotten him in trouble before when he was running for president in uh 1987.
Um he was simultaneously chairing the Robert Bork hearings when I was a young White House aide to President Reagan and uh running for president at the same time.
And he was running against uh one of his opponents was Michael Dukakis, the then Democratic governor of Massachusetts, who finally wound up winning the nomination.
And Michael DeCakis put together a little split screen deal that showed uh the British Labor Party leader of the day, Neil Kinnock, uh going on about his family from Wales and and how they were Welsh coal miners and how did he get an education and his wife got an education and all this, and you know, why am I the King Kennedy?
Well, the Dukakis campaign discovered and and videoed Joe Biden out on the campaign trail using exactly that story from Neil Kinnock, except he changed it to the Biden's and Scranton instead of Wales.
So uh they put together this clip, and uh then we got into a situation where Joe Biden's campaign was saying it was a mistake and he doesn't do this kind of thing.
And as it turns out, uh I had I had uh caught him plagiarizing and I notified the New York Times and uh the this the back story on this.
I really uh just to set it up for the audience.
So Jeffrey and I were talking before we got on the air, and Jeff starts telling me this story, and I'm like, you've got to tell it like this on the air.
Like it's just it gives you the picture of how these things actually used to happen when people were telling the truth, as you did.
So so when I was a kid, uh a seventeen-year-old teenager living in Allentown in Pennsylvania, I was going to finish my last two years of high school there.
And I was a big fan of uh then Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of President the late President Kennedy at that point, who was himself running for president in nineteen sixty-eight against uh in the primaries against Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, and he had competition from Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy.
And uh quite sadly, he was in Los Angeles the night he won the California Democratic primary, and uh he thanks everybody and says, you know, and now it's on to Chicago where the convention was going to be, and and let's win there.
And he starts to turn and somebody grabs him and says, Senator, come this way, and they take him off the podium and back through the kitchen of the hotel.
And there on the top of a table was a young Palestinian guy named Sirhan Sirhan with the pistol, and he shoots and kills Robert Kennedy.
Uh Senator Kennedy lasted for maybe 24 hours or something, but he passed away.
The nation was in shock.
Uh it was just it was awful.
And uh my good old Nixon loving mother uh consented to getting on a bus with me from Allentown and went to uh into New York And uh stood in line to go past uh the Kennedy casket and St. Patrick's Cathedral.
We stood in line for hours so that you know I could reach out and touch the flag on the casket and all this sort of thing.
Sometime after that, some people in the record business put together these long playing records, which were popular in the day, of Robert, it was a collection of Robert Kennedy's speeches, and little geek that I was, I would sit there in my room and listen to them for hours and memorize them.
Okay, flash ahead to September of 1987.
And uh this whole incident with uh of plagiarizing the Neil Kinnock comes forward and the Biden campaign says, Oh, well, this was a mistake, and he doesn't do this.
I uh knew this not to be so because I had heard him on a on a campaign stop in California a few months earlier, and I thought, well, I'll listen to him.
It was a snowy day in Washington, and everybody had gone home, so I'm sitting there alone in my White House office with a TV on and I'm listening, and then I began to realize that strangely I'm getting to the end of his sentences before he is.
And I thought, you know, this is this is just stunning.
He's he's outright plagiarizing from Bobby Kennedy.
So when this other incident happened, and it was said that he didn't do this, I picked up the phone and called uh Maureen Dowd, then a columnist with an uh then a reporter for the New York Times, told her she was astounded and asked if I could document it, and I said, sure.
And I uh went home to my parents' house, went into the basement, pulled out the records, brought it back, uh, gave it to the New York Times, and uh within two days they had a story.
It was a front page story, and uh on the inside of it I was I was quoted.
Um so I just thought we we would talk uh it might my point is how smart is the president because it's it it it's just unimaginably not smart to plagiarize uh in the first case the leader of the British Labor Party who's no private citizen that no one knows.
Of course they have somebody had video of it, and it wasn't smart to p plagiarize Robert Kennedy because of course Robert Kennedy was one of the most famous people in American history at that point, and and was well on tape with all of this sort of thing.
So do we have uh we have some of the uh tape on this, and uh uh we thought we play it for you.
But this standard is not a measure of how we can evaluate the condition of our society, it cannot measure the health of our children, the quality of our education, the joy of their play.
Yet the Cross National Product is not allowed for the health of our children, and that is Robert Calvin.
For the joy of their play.
Let us pledge that our generation of Americans will pay any price, bear any burden, accept any challenge and meet any hardship to secure the blessings of prosperity and the promise of opportunity for our children.
We shall pay any price, bear any burden.
President John F. Kennedy any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe.
To assure the survival and the success of liberty.
And I started thinking as I was coming over here.
Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?
Oh boy am I?
Yes.
That's Kinneck in a thousand generations to be able to get the university.
Why is it that my wife who's sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college?
Why is Cenness the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get the university?
No, it's not because they weren't as smart.
It's not because it didn't work as hard.
It's because they didn't have a platform upon which to stand.
Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment, of course not.
It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.
included in that clip, I mean, uh he he actually plagiarized President Kennedy's inaugural address, which in the world of uh presidents is one of the most famous inaugural addresses ever.
Uh and yet there he is as if and and it what what boggles my mind is he's saying this to audiences of Democrats, where you can bet there's a healthy percentage of people in the audience that remember this stuff or know it or they're somehow familiar with it.
So the the question I had is you know, that's just not smart to do.
And now you look around at all the government spending, you look around at what's happening on the border wall, you look around at the pull out from Afghanistan.
Uh I mean, on and on and on goes this business, and you think, wow, we we have a serious problem here with a president who's just not uh you know, however nice or not nice he might be, is just not on the on the ball here, and and that's a real problem.
So I would gently push back on that and just say I know you're shocked.
Um I I don't know that it's that he's not that smart.
I I will go on the record and say I don't think he's smart.
But I also just don't think he cares because there is no one to stop him.
If you think about the election in 2020, he didn't campaign because he didn't had to.
He was paid for, they knew that they had all the money in the coffers and they were gonna do everything they could to get him in that office.
You know, when he went and he let out Brittany Griner and and not Paul Wheelin, why?
Because he knew he had the media and he had the administration to back him up and no one was going to stop him.
When he said he didn't want to bust people of color into his neighborhood because he didn't want to turn his neighborhood into a racial jungle, it was because he knew no one would stop him.
When he told a female reporter that she could sit down and take it easy because uh, you know, there was a time when they weren't even in that room with him, nobody said anything to him.
And just like nobody said anything until one person calls it out, such as yourself to the media, and Maureen Dow to her credit at the time.
Yes.
When the New York Times still considered themselves to be a paper of you know, record that actually did things that mattered, right?
And and when that story was published, it created quite a fur.
And shortly thereafter, I mean, other people began noticing things, and I think Leslie Stahl from CBS uh had looked into his law school.
Correct, hit the background, the GPA, how he finished.
I mean, it's just like the story the other day about the purple heart and Uncle Frank and what are you talking about?
But again, you see it nowhere.
Right.
It it's really unconscionable.
And I think too, to Ethan's point, you know, it's the difference between a media of then and a media of now.
Oh, definitely.
I mean, you can't say anything now.
If I had discovered this in today's world and handed it over to a reporter for the New York Times, it would never see the light.
FBI would have been saying this is Russian disinformation.
That's right.
That is exactly right.
And uh yeah, the media environment is just so totally different, and and it's not for the better.
Um all I can say.
But also they destroy you.
Yes.
I mean, look at John Paul Mac Isaac, right?
Yeah.
Guy owns a freaking repair shop fixing computers and laptops, not bothering anybody.
Thinks he does the right thing, calls what he believes to be the premier agency of law enforcement.
Right.
And they destroy him.
Right.
Why?
Yeah.
Well, this is this is what they do, and and you know, I'm I'm conscious of the fact that I'm sitting here on the Sean Hannity show and realizing that in the course of history conservatives began to wake up.
And God bless our late friend Rush Limbaugh, who did that uh show and really began to set things on fire, and then Sean and then Fox News and and now it's Newsmax and the Media Research Center, and I mean it's all over the Washington Times, etc.
So uh on we go here.
This will be a great uh a great year, lots of challenges, and uh I hope you'll be tuning in to Sean, who will be here uh every day once we get started again, and Merry Christmas to you.
And we will be right back after for one more short segment.
Thank you for joining me today.
My name is Jeffrey Lord, and it has been a very real honor to sit in for our friend Sean Henry today.
Please follow me at real Jeffrey Lord and listen to my podcast wherever podcasts are found.
The word of the Lord and my website, the Jeffrey Lord.com.
I wish you a Merry Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, and a happy new year.
God bless you all and God bless this nation.
Good night.
And thank you, Jeffrey, for filling in in for us today.
We are so grateful to have you.
You have been a real patriot.
Love doing it.
You want smart political talk without the meltdowns?
We got you.
And I'm Carol Markowitz.
And I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
We've been around the block in media and we're doing things differently.
Normally is about real conversations.
Thoughtful, try to be funny, grounded, and no panic.
We'll keep you informed and entertained without ruining your day.
Join us every Tuesday and Thursday.
Normally, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.